I think this idea first appeared in the United States. I'm sure there's a story about how Ford sold the Model T. Few people could afford to purchase up front, so groups of people joined together and paid a set amount each month. Say $50 amongst 100 people. Each month, they'd buy a Model T and a few lucky people would get the car. So, rather than 100 people waiting a year to purchase, on average they waited only 6 months. That spawned the creation of mail order, then revolving credit, and the Western world has never looked back.
Is it necessary to buy books? At my university (in the UK), they have lots of copies of textbooks in the library. And if there's a book they do not have, you can ask them to buy it and they most probably will.
When each shipment nets maybe $30,000,000 for the shipping company and you pay about £20,000 for the crew during that time, you'd need to save a lot of money elsewhere to make this worthwhile.
From my understanding, a big part of its intended usage is for interfacing from applications in other languages. So you can offload all of the difficult calculations from your C/Java/PHP program and get Wolfram to do the work.
I haven't cited any statistic from blockchain.info, and haven't considered hardware at all. All I have done is employ economic argument, which I think makes sense. It doesn't matter whether or not particular individuals are using ASICs. All that matters is that, collectively, they are making only a tiny profit (if any). This argument doesn't require consideration of hash-rate or particular hardware at all.
A new block gets mined every 10 minutes, each with a 25BTC bounty. That's 600 * 25 * 6 * 24 = $2,160,000 per day. No rational person would spend more in electricity than the reward, hence the 1-to-1 conversion. (In fact, miners do spend more than they earn, collectively.)
Here's a back of the envelope calculation. In theory (by supply-demand idea), you would make a negligible profit mining bitcoins. Each bitcoin is worth about $600. If our supply-demand assumption is true, the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. Or about 18,000,000 kWh per day. Or about 9,000,000 kg of C02 per day (9000 metric tonnes). That's about 3,285 thousand metric tonnes per year, or about the entire annual CO2 output of a country such as Papua New Guinea.
Personally, I'd rather my information be in the hands of the United States rather than my own governments (the United Kingdom -- unfortunately it's with both!) Your own government can do more against your interests than a foreign government can.
On the other hand, any traffic that needs to cross the Atlantic, via the Apollo cables, takes a detour via GCHQ Bude, which is funded by the NSA (http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/USA-spent-millions-Bude-spy-...). I suspect a lot of non-US traffic goes via London, too.
Here's another experiment. Eat 500 calories of 50% fat, 50% sugar. For example, ice cream. You'll feel much hungrier than both a fat and sugar only diet. It's fat and sugar combined that cause obesity problems.
While this technical analysis is interesting, I'm not convinced it is a significant reason behind Flappy Bird's success. I don't think any other game has created as much of a buzz. When you have your friends telling you to download it, when you see school kids on the train competing with their high scores, when it is featured in every newspaper you pick up, it is no wonder the game was successful. The Apple Store formula doesn't even come into the calculation when you have word-of-mouth. Perhaps it was just a good game that people enjoyed.
The primary function of the stock market is to exchange ownership (shares) in a company. It's odd that we seem to have forgotten that. What value is there in a computer owning a stock for 10 milliseconds?
I found this at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=447831.80: "Actually, I set it up to prioritize the small transactions. The 1 BTC depositor will have to wait a while, and everyone else will get paid out as soon as their transaction confirms (this makes sense since the 1 BTC guy is making more money anyway)." Clearly doesn't understand the concept.
It is either a scam or very poorly coded. I've seen one transaction in the blockchain for 7BTC from yesterday that hasn't been paid. But, people sending 0.01BTC today are being paid. Any proper Ponzi scheme would pay back in time order, not by order of value.
Yes, mine is just a few photographs on a page. No video. I guess you need to have a certain number of photos uploaded/tagged on Facebook to create a video, whereas I make an effort to not upload any such content.
I'm surprised the figures for the United States vs United Kingdom are are so far apart (550 vs 150). These leads me to think much of the usage is water lost during transmission, or used in farming/industry rather than in the home.
I'm sorry, but this isn't correct. Firstly, you need to understand what Binomial is describing. It is not describing the time between outcomes. It is describing the number of times you will observe a positive result amongst n independent Bernoulli trials (Yes/No trials). By the "CDF approaches 1", what you are saying is that P(X <= n) = 1. But, we know that to be true by assumption -- we can't possibly observe more than n positive results from n trials. The continuous-time analogue would be the Poisson process -- this counts the number of valid blocks that have been generated up to a time t. The inter-arrival time -- the time between valid blocks -- is a random variable with an Exponential distribution. This is the distribution we are really looking at. And Exponential is memoryless (see Wikipedia for a proof).